abode.

It was now night. The Heavens broadened round him in all the loving yet
august tranquillity of the season and the hour; the stars bathed the
living atmosphere with a solemn light; and above--about--around--

"The holy time was quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration." He looked
forth upon the deep and ineffable stillness of the night, and indulged
the reflections that it suggested.

"Ye mystic lights," said he soliloquizing: "worlds upon
worlds--infinite--incalculable.--Bright defiers of rest and change,
rolling for ever above our petty sea of mortality, as, wave after wave,
we fret forth our little life, and sink into the black abyss;--can we
look upon you, note your appointed order, and your unvarying course, and
not feel that we are indeed the poorest puppets of an all-pervading
and resistless destiny? Shall we see throughout creation each marvel
fulfilling its pre-ordered fate--no wandering from its orbit--no
variation in its seasons--and yet imagine that the Arch-ordainer
will hold back the tides He has sent from their unseen source, at our
miserable bidding? Shall we think that our prayers can avert a doom
woven with the skein of events? To change a particle of our fate, might
change the destiny of millions! Shall the link forsake the chain, and
yet the chain be unbroken? Away, then, with our vague repinings, and our
blind demands. All must walk onward to their goal, be he the wisest
who looks not one step behind. The colours of our existence were doomed
before our birth--our sorrows and our crimes;--millions of ages back,
when this hoary earth was peopled by other kinds, yea! ere its atoms
had formed one layer of its present soil, the Eternal and the all-seeing
Ruler of the universe, Destiny, or God, had here fixed the moment of
our birth and the limits of our career. What then is crime?--Fate! What
life?--Submission!"

Such were the strange and dark thoughts which, constituting a part
indeed of his established creed, broke over Aram's mind. He sought for a
fairer subject for meditation, and Madeline Lester rose before him.

Eugene Aram was a man whose whole life seemed to have been one sacrifice
to knowledge. What is termed pleasure had no attraction for him. From
the mature manhood at which he had arrived, he looked back along his
youth, and recognized no youthful folly. Love he had hitherto regarded
with a cold though not an incurious eye: intemperance had never lured
him to a momentary self-aba